Psychiatry has focused on pathological personality traits, used the clinical interview as the principal method of their assessment, and embraced a categorical approach to their classification. Academic psychology has centered its interest on normal personality, relied on rating scales and self-administered inventories as the usual methods of assessment, and favored a dimensional taxonomy. The present proposal would attempt to merge these two relatively independent traditions. It would attempt to demonstrate the feasibility of developing an omnibus personality inventory that sampled the domains of both normal and abnormal personality. The abnormal personality types on the test would be calibrated and validated against a state of the art semistructured clinical interview based on the DSM-IV personality disorders. The test would also attempt to assess those dimensions of personality of traditional and contemporary interest to clinicians and personality psychologists. The inventory would incorporate features not ordinarily found in existing personality tests. It would have an informant version that would permit the integration of information from the subject and a close relative or acquaintance. This would diminish the influence of obstacles to validity like the subject's response style, lack of awareness, and need to create a favorable impression. The test would also identify and attempt to adjust for trait- state artifacts by assessing current mental state as well as personality traits. The scales on the proposed test would be developed on a sample of 1000 normals and 500 nonpsychotic psychiatric patients, and cross-validated on a second sample of the same size. If the scale development proved successful, the test would ultimately be standardized on a national normative sample in a subsequent study. Such an omnibus test could prove valuable as a lingua franca, economical source of information, and standard tool for use by investigators interested in the study of normal and abnormal personality and their relationship to various physical and mental disorders.
